Dr. Martyn Newman argues that psychology historically focused on defining mental illness, and that a shift toward positive psychology opened attention to human strengths. He references Daniel Goleman (mid-1990s) and presents the claim that values and emotional factors—not just intellect or external rewards/punishments—unlock creativity and high achievement.
It's a fascinating discipline, psychology. We've spent the best part of 100 years defining what's wrong with people. We've got taxonomic systems that define mental illness using language. That's extraordinary. I had a mother come to me not that long ago and she said, Doctor, can you evaluate my 13 year old son? I said, sure, he's suffering from a transient psychosis with impaired reality testing and intermittent rage disorder and episodic radical mood swings, but look, the prognosis is great for full recovery. And she said, how can you say all that without even meeting him? I said, I thought. She said he was 13. But I got to thinking, what would it be like if psychology could turn its remarkable resources not just to defining mental illness and disease, but really what constitutes the building blocks of nobility of when people rise to the occasion of life and respond with extraordinary creativity and courage in the face of life's struggles and situations. And of course, I wasn't alone. There was a whole group of psychologists at the time who were thinking the same way and founded something that we've all heard about the positive psychology movement. But the problem in the 90s was that we didn't have in psychology any well formed models of well being, you see. And so none of us saw this coming. And when Dan Goldman came out and published this book in 1995, 1997, nobody saw it coming. And in this remarkable book, Dan Goldman came out and said everything we thought we knew about how the intellect works and about what constitutes performance and high achievement and what drives that for over 100 years we've been dead wrong about. See, we used to think it was sticks or carrots. And if you went to the school I went to, they'd never hurt a carrot. Some of you went to that same school. An extraordinary idea. And Dan Goldman comes out, he says, it's not sticks, it's not carrots, it's not your intellect alone that drives your potential. He says, I'll tell you what it is, he said, it's values. When you tap into the things that people feel, the things they deeply care about in the deepest parts of their being, you release inside people this most remarkable creative energy to achieve extraordinary things.
Dr Martyn Newman - Putting Humans at the Heart of Business Transformation. MSL UK
